%D 2022
%I SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD
%L discovery10171020
%T Marital status and genetic liability independently predict coronary heart disease incidence
%O This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
%X Aims: Married individuals have a lower coronary heart disease (CHD) risk than non-married, but the mechanisms behind this are not fully understood. We analyzed whether genetic liability to CHD may affect these associations. Methods: Marital status, a polygenic score of CHD (PGS-CHD), and other risk factors for CHD were measured from 35,444 participants (53% female) in Finnish population-based surveys conducted between 1992 and 2012. During the register-based follow-up until 2020, there were 2439 fatal and non-fatal incident CHD cases. The data were analyzed using linear and Cox regression models. Results: Divorced and cohabiting men and women had a higher genetic risk of CHD than married individuals, but the difference was very small (0.023–0.058 standard deviation of PGS-CHD, p-values 0.011–0.429). Both marital status and PGS-CHD were associated with CHD incidence, but the associations were largely independent. Adjusting for behavioral and metabolic risk factors for CHD explained part of these associations (11–20%). No interaction was found between marital status and PGS-CHD for CHD incidence. Conclusions: We showed minor differences between the marital status categories in PGS-CHD and demonstrated that marital status and genetic liability predicted CHD incidence largely independently. This emphasizes the need to measure multiple risk factors when predicting CHD risk.
%A Karri Silventoinen
%A Hannu Lahtinen
%A Kaarina Korhonen
%A George Davey Smith
%A Samuli Ripatti
%A Tim Morris
%A Pekka Martikainen
%K Science & Technology, Life Sciences & Biomedicine, Public, Environmental & Occupational Health, Marital status, coronary disease, genetics, socioeconomic factors
%C Sweden
%J Scandinavian Journal of Public Health